As an owner or manager of an MSP, you have a lot on your plate. Our industry is constantly changing and keeping up requires a ton of effort. One key strategy for keeping up in this environment is learning and adapting from your peers.
“Don’t reinvent the wheel.” I know it’s cliché, but it’s so true. It’s so important to get paint on canvas to get the ball rolling. There are very few situations where you’ll need to start from scratch: there are tens of thousands of MSPs all working on similar challenges to the ones you are facing. Start there.
Let’s start with rapid fire examples of exactly how we’ve used templates at our MSP:
- Heavily adapted The Tech Tribe Sales Presentation for larger in-person sales meetings.
- We have an MSP in our peer group that is amazing at operations. We adapted their onboarding checklist and added it as a project template in our PSA – ConnectWise.
- Watched a video from a successful MSP teaching how to use Intune properly in managing clients. That one video put us on a path to maximize Microsoft 365 and using it as a differentiator.
- Reviewed the most successful marketing content from other industries and applied it to our marketing campaigns and content.
- Adapted the job descriptions provided by The Tech Tribe and others in our peer group.
- Reviewed the most effective MSP Marketing direct mail campaigns and created our own.
This just scratches the surface of templates that we’ve adapted to quickly improve our business. Instead of spending dozens of hours creating our own from scratch, we spent a couple of hours adapting to fit our unique needs and the needs of our clients.
Table of Contents
An important concept
I had a wonderful conversation with the founder of Tech Tribe, Nigel Moore, and he laid out an important concept: “Free communities versus paid communities.”
When an MSP is paying to be part of a community, not only are they given better advice, but they also give better advice! Free communities seem to have a lot of advice that sounds good but not applicable or being pushed by vendors.
When the MSP has “skin in the game”, it leads to better content and templates overall.
MSP Operations Templates
Operational templates seem to be the most popular. Onboarding templates, IT takeover templates, job descriptions, KPIs, etc. are all popular with many options to find including:
- Search on Google – You likely found this article by searching on Google. Great job! You’re on your way already.
- The Tech Tribe – The Tech Tribe has some excellent operational templates that we’ve adapted over the years to improve our MSP.
- MSP Peer Groups – The beauty of peer groups is that each MSP has different strengths. Asking your peers what they do for specific challenges will uncover a gold mine of excellent templates. They are almost always happy to provide it!
The highest value templates we’ve received over the years have come from our peer group. You may be asking yourself, “How do I get a peer group?”
There are tons of effective peer groups out there. Here is a list pulled from the MSP360 blog on peer groups that has done an amazing job of gathering the top groups:
- ASCII
- MSPGeek
- The Tech Tribe
- IT Pool Party
- MSP-Ignite
- Trumethods
- HTG Peer Group
- Taylor Business Group
- The 20
Unfortunately, some of these groups do not lock by geographic region. So, you may have MSPs near you. That can cause you and others to be hesitant about being completely open.
We went a little unconventional and built our own peer group at our MSP. We were all using the same marketing agency in the past. As our relationship with each other grew stronger but our relationship with the marketing agency dissolved, we all broke off and created our own peer group. We only have 5 MSPs in this peer group, and that’s plenty! We’ve helped each other tremendously over the years. I’ve primarily assisted with marketing while others have assisted in operations. It’s been great, so don’t think you have to have a large peer group to get value out of it.
In addition, MSP Camp has a locked Facebook group for members. I lock it to members so the MSPs can have peace of mind that they are not discussing sensitive topics with competitors. From that Facebook group, many peer groups are already starting to form! Grateful to be able to provide an outlet that has led to lifelong friendships.
MSP Marketing Templates
Marketing templates are another important consideration when improving your MSP. The owners always seem to be more engaged with operations, which is fine. However, the MSPs that grow the most have an owner that is actively engaged with marketing and growing their business.
Just like operational templates, effective marketing campaigns can take dozens (if not hundreds) of hours to complete properly. Why start from scratch?
There are many excellent marketing content companies that can provide full campaigns or at least a solid framework for you to adapt as your own. Here are three examples:
- MSP Camp – That’s us 😊 We’re an MSP and take our most successful marketing campaigns, content, and templates and put it on an inexpensive membership site for MSPs around the globe to adapt. We can also brand for our members, so it matches their brand perfectly. I built MSP Camp because it’s something I wish I would have had when I started 7 years ago!
- MSP Marketing Edge – This company provides clever content and has a much larger team than MSP Camp so they can pump out more content monthly. While they do fall into posting a lot of stock photos and videos which I personally am not a fan of, they do it in a way that makes it more engaging. Overall, they have a great service and we’ve heard many good things!
- IT Rockstars – Another great choice for content is IT Rockstars. I’ve had a few conversations with Scott, and he is a solid marketing professional. He is also an SEO specialist from what I’ve seen. His content consistently ranks very high, and he uses that approach to teach MSPs about content and SEO and how they work together. Their content is strong, and members seem very happy with the service as well.
I’ve done a lot of research, and these are definitely the top 3 when it comes to MSP Marketing Templates and content. They are all fairly priced and only allow one MSP per area, so you won’t have to worry about bumping into other MSPs using similar content.
The major differentiator MSP Camp has is it is run by a current MSP. This helps with creating the most relevant content that prospects care about today. I am personally in multiple sales meetings per week. I take those current questions and concerns and adapt them into effective messaging for our members (and our own MSP).
MSP Marketing Templates Examples
Conclusion
I was on an island as the sole marketing person for an MSP for years. My growth was stunted, to say the least! When I started engaging with prominent marketing and sales professionals and adapted their work to make it my own, my development skyrocketed. Then something amazing happened: I became the one that was providing the templates and advice! Now I can give back because those templates helped me to go further, faster.
Get ahead of the curve by finding the right templates for your MSP. Whether they’re around service delivery, recruiting, marketing, or any other challenges you have, there are plenty of MSPs that are successful at these topics and willing to help!
Make sure to check out our free 30-day trial to MSP Camp and grab some of these templates for yourself. Use our content as it is or adapt it to make it perfect for your MSP!
